Specification based transformation allows business analysts, information analysts or system analysts to create an executable specification of the transformation needed for EAI (Enterprise Application Integration). The specification needs to be simple enough for analysts to use, while still being rigorous enough to allow execution
The current state of the art is that analysts create non-structured information transformation specifications using various software tools such as but not limited to Microsoft™ Word™ and Microsoft Excel™.
These non-structured information transformation specifications are then passed to programmers which develop code that performs the information transformation that is defined in the non-structured information specification.
The code can be developed by using a unique mapping tool provided by their EAI server vendor (e.g. IBM™ or Webmethods™), or by programming the code. In many cases the programmers use a mixture of mapping tools and programming.
This dual stage process usually results in inconsistencies. Typically changes to the implementation code are not reflected back to the specification s and eventually the code does not accurately represent the initial non-structured specification.
There is a need to perform information transformation while maintaining a correlations between the transformation code and the non-structured information transformation specification. Especially, there is a need to allow both programmer and analyst to use the tools they are used to without introducing inconsistencies between the information transformation code and the non-structured information transformation specification.